This blog is the third in a series of guest posts on technology and the brain to celebrate Scientific American Mind’s 10-year anniversary. The magazine’s special November/December issue similarly highlights the interface between code and thought in profiling a future, more digital YOU. Video games are an increasingly common pastime, especially for children, adolescents and [...]

George Ioannou is the Director of Hepatology at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Healthcare System and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. His clinical and research interests relate to the management of chronic liver diseases. He plays video games not to train or test his brain but in order to have something in common with his 11-year old son.

In 1995, Ivan Goldberg, a New York psychiatrist, published one of the first diagnostic tests for Internet Addiction Disorder. The criteria appeared on psycom.net, a psychiatry bulletin board, and began with an air of earnest authenticity: “A maladaptive pattern of Internet use, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress as manifested by three (or more) [...]

LAS VEGAS—In a sign of how wireless technologies have moved to the fore in consumer electronics, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs kicked off the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here Monday night with a keynote spotlighting the impact of superfast processors on mobile apps, gaming and even ultra high-definition television (Ultra HDTV). Smart phones, tablets and [...]

Larry Greenemeier is the associate editor of technology for Scientific American, covering a variety of tech-related topics, including biotech, computers, military tech, nanotech and robots. Larry can be found on Twitter as @lggreenemeier.

If someone asked you to sketch a portrait of a gamer who spends countless hours each week inhabiting an avatar—say, an elf or a warlock—in a virtual fantasy world, what kind of person would you draw? A teenage boy whose pimply forehead hovers mere centimeters from the computer screen? Needless to say, such stereotypes are [...]

If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when [...]